Stories for Tomorrow – Lived Today, Everywhere

High, not mitey!

High, not mitey!

It’s far from a dog’s life for bees
living on rooftops in Melbourne, Australia, free from the Varroa mite
that has afflicted the rest of the world.

“Welcome to the roof!” We arrive
puffing after climbing to the top of the Alfred Deakin Building in
iconic Federation Square in the very heart of Melbourne, Australia’s
second largest city. “We’re so unfit at the beginning of season,
and then you do a few of these rooftop climbs every couple of weeks.”

Beekeeper Vanessa Kwiatkowski looks as
if she’s stepped out of a science-fiction movie, dressed in what
looks like a white spacesuit with a mesh-fronted helmet. Before us
are ten hives on artificial grass, with pot plants to help keep the
area cool – and most importantly to provide pollen for the hundreds
of thousands of resident bees.

Bee like a dog

“If you’re pretty relaxed, then
they are,” Vanessa reassures us. “Bees smell fear like dogs.”
It’s the first of several bee-dog analogies we will hear on our
visit to the inner-city rooftop hives, some of 80 tended by Vanessa
and her partner Mat Lumalasi. But more on that shortly. It’s time
to open the hives.

With Australian paperbark in the
smoker, Mat wafts smoke over the hive to be inspected. It smells like
the bushfires that are all too common in Australian summers. Contrary
to popular belief, Vanessa thinks that smoke doesn’t actually calm
the bees, but sends the bees into an “emergency drill”. They are
then too preoccupied to worry about stinging the beekeepers. And it
appears to be working. These bees seem pretty docile. “Bees
generally are like this,” says Mat. “They are not big, angry,
aggressive swarms like we see in the movies.”

“Humans have been selectively
breeding bees for traits for hundreds of years and unfortunately
we’ve selected for a lot of docility in bees, which is great for us
beekeepers, but it hasn’t made them particularly resistant to
disease,” Vanessa tells us. “They become like Labradors. Nothing
against Labs…” Mat finishes the thought: “…But they’ve
become a little too docile.”

From IT buzzwords to … buzz!

Former IT workers Vanessa and Mat
started Melbourne City Rooftop Honey five years ago, concerned about
the decline of bees around the world. Australia’s top science body
says that honey bees are essential for the pollination of about one
third of the food we eat, including fruit, vegetables, oils, seeds
and nuts. Vanessa and Mat worried that the vital role of pollination
was not being recognised or valued, and they were concerned about the
risk to the food supply. So concerned that they took the dramatic
step of quitting their jobs to become full-time beekeepers.

It was Vanessa’s idea to place hives
on the roofs of cafés, restaurants and hotels; to bring sustainable
honey production – and bees – back to the city. Suburban bees
generally produce more than bees in rural areas, due to the
proliferation of flowers in the urban areas. The pair felt it was
vital to include honey bees in our cities and urban landscapes, and
they wanted to educate others about bees and their role. Putting
hives on unused rooftops and balconies would also cut food miles,
with the honey produced just metres from the food outlet.

When she googled her idea, Vanessa
found that cities in Europe had been doing this exact thing for a
very long time. But there is one very important difference between
rooftop honey in Australia and in other countries around the world.
And that difference is the Varroa mite.

Federation Square is located in the heart of the city center of Melbourne. | Photo (CC BY-ND): Wesley Nel

It served as a backdrop for several concerts, festivals and also a screening of the documentary More Than Honey. | Photo (CC BY-ND): Wesley Nel

The top of the Alfread Deakin Building at the Federation Square serves Rooftop Honey as a working space. | Photo (CC BY-ND): Wesley Nel

Between the skyscrapers of Melbourne the hives have found their place to be(e). | Photo (CC BY-ND): Wesley Nel

Mat gently pulls one of the wooden
frames out of the rooftop hive. He’s excited about the size and
strength of the brood pattern, which shows where the queen has laid
her eggs – in effect a bee nursery. “You don’t see strong brood
patterns like this in Europe anymore,” Vanessa tells us.

The Varroa mite has been attacking bee
colonies since the 1960s, slowly spreading from Japan and the
then-USSR to all other countries - except Australia. It sucks the
"blood" or hemolymph of adult bees, making the bees more
prone to infections, and often leading to the collapse of the colony.
The export of healthy bees is now a growing industry in Australia.
But how long might this last? “So Varroa mite is in New Zealand,
it’s in the Solomon Islands, it’s in New Guinea, it’s all
around us, and they do believe it’s a matter of when and not if,”
says Mat. But he says Australia’s quarantine services are doing a
fantastic job.

Mat would still like to see other
measures explored. “Find an island off Australia that’s 20
kilometres off shore and start up a bee sanctuary and start breeding
them up. They have the international seed vault in Scandinavia,” he
argues. A wide variety of plant seeds are stored on a remote
Norwegian island to ensure that crop diversity will not be lost in
the face of natural or man-made disasters. A blueprint for bee
survival?

Worker bees vs. working dogs

And the march of the Varroa mite has
led to a rethink of bee breeding techniques. “Instead of docility,
they are looking more for hygienic, clean bees, that remove parasites
and dead larvae from cells before putting the cap on,” says Mat. So
it’s goodbye Labrador, hello Australian Cattle Dog. “A working
cattle dog looks after itself pretty much. They don’t get a lot of
love and they just work all day,” Mat says.

And there is a lot to do if you are a
worker bee: Nursing, guard duties, foraging, funeral duties,
cleaning… the list goes on. And it’s not just work in the hives.
Apart from the vital crop pollination role, bees have been trained to
sniff out land mines just like – you guessed it – dogs!

Thousands of pets

Vanessa and Mat are passionate about
the weekend hobby that has taken over their lives. Their plan was to
provide bees and their hives for free by raising funds and asking
local businesses to sponsor hives. The response has been so
overwhelming that they are now considering employing staff so the
project can continue to grow.

Restaurants can
host a hive on site and have it fully maintained by Rooftop Honey.
The sponsoring restaurant gets up to 20 percent of the honey share,
or 6 kilograms, whichever comes first. For an annual maintenance fee
of 500 Australian dollars, Melbournians can sponsor a hive of
40,000-50,000 bees, producing on average 30 to 50 kilograms of honey
each year. Most commercial hives would expect 100 to 150 kilograms
from a similar-sized hive, extracting the honey and feeding sugar
syrup back to the bees. Mat and Vanessa don’t feed their bees,
leaving two fifths of each hive so the bees can eat their own honey.
“If we were to take more and the weather was to turn bad, they
could go backwards quite quickly,” Mat says.

So apart from a portion of the honey
from the hive, Rooftop Honey sponsors get a sense of community
through participating in a sustainable enterprise, an opportunity to
learn about and participate in beekeeping, and a different type of
pet. But unlike a dog, they can’t pat them!